Weekend reading - Nov 10 2008

• Excel Web Application Announced at PDC - someone at Microsoft has finally woken up and realized that they cannot find the move towards the web. What will be interesting is how they monetize this, whether they get creative about this, even risking reducing their huge margins on this in exchange for crushing competition from Google and other entrants in this space.
• Go Phish - why it is so difficult for people to avoid falling a prey to online scams and phishing attacks, EVEN when forewarned. The attached email in the post makes for some hilarious reading.
• Status, Please - you will never attend 'status' meetings the same way.
• Can Oracle’s former Fusion chief rescue SAP’s on-demand strategy? - John Wookey was one of two people that Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, had noted as being capable of running Oracle. This is in the book Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle
  , published sometime in 2003. Thomas Kurian, the other executive Larry names, has since moved within Oracle to build out Fusion Middleware development into a very successful middleware platform, and also head Fusion Apps development.
  
• An interesting study on iPhone usability - not just to the iPhone, but I think illustrates how people invariably end up trying to use almost any product's interface in ways that the designers would probably never have imagined. Truly great products are probably those that anticipate these quirks well.
• The Economist reduced to reblogging Wired [Great Moments In Journalism] - yes, even venerable media companies like the 'Economist' also plagiarize.